Sorcerer's Feud

by Katharine Kerr

  “Kind of a hot day for sports,” I said.

  “Yeah.” He paused for a gulp of air and a smile. “How’s your brother?”

  “Not good. The wound might be infected, and they’re really doping him up with morphine.”

  Tor made a sour face. “Infected, huh? Maybe Nils did something to the bullets. A curse, I mean.”

  “I kind of wondered about that.”

  “I bet.” He tossed the empty bottle into the recycling bin we kept by the back door. “I’ll go in with you tomorrow and look things over.”

  “Thanks.” I hesitated, then decided to just blurt it out. “Uh, something else happened.”

  Tor turned around fast. “What? You looked freaked.”

  “I am. That Frost Giant kid came back. He told me there are two vitkar in the house. You and then a dead one.”

  “Shit.”

  “It’s got to be Nils, doesn’t it?”

  “Who else, but I don’t see how he could get in here, not even as a walking spirit. I’ve got runes plastered all over the place. Although—” He muttered a few obscenities. “I did invite him in, during that last ritual. I dragged him in, face it. That may be all the entry he needs. At least to the downstairs.”

  “Can you do something to keep him out?”

  “Sure. I can work a spell to make him long to be back in his grave. Although—didn’t one of those news reports say he was cremated?”

  “Yeah, once the police released the body.”

  “How long did they hold it?”

  “I don’t remember exactly, but at least a week.”

  “A week in cold storage. Maybe a little more. That’d be long enough.”

  “Long enough for what?”

  “Establishing himself as an entity. One of the afturganga, the walking dead.” Tor frowned down at the floor while he thought something through. “But that’s not so easy to do. I’m surprised. I didn’t think he was powerful enough.”

  “You’re saying he wasn’t really dead?”

  “No. His body was dead, sure. Just not the rest of him, not right away, anyway. If he was strong enough to refuse to go onward, he was probably strong enough to turn himself into an afturganga.”

  I could find nothing to say to that. I started to shiver, laid both hands on my face, and realized that my skin felt cold, clammy. Tor put an arm around my shoulders and steered me into the living room, where afternoon sunlight had just started to fall through the western window. He opened it for the fresh air, then gathered élan while I stood trembling in the patch of light. When he raised his hands, the élan poured over me. I gulped it down, soaked it up, whatever it was I did, until at last I felt strong and sated.

  “Okay now?” Tor said.

  “Yes, thank you. I feel human again.” The words struck me as all wrong. “Well, if I am human.”

  “Most of you is, anyway.” He grinned at me. “I’ll love you no matter what.”

  “Thanks. I needed to hear that.”

  He laughed and pulled me close for a hug. Ever since the shooting, I’d been too stressed to even think about sex, but when he kissed me, I felt the old fire re-ignite. It sounds gross, but I loved the way he smelled when he was sweaty. Pheromones, I guess, but the scent aroused me a lot more than any musk aftershave would have. I rubbed against him and took another kiss. When he stroked my buttocks, I caught my breath in a gasp.

  “You feel better,” he said.

  “Totally. And no, I don’t want you to take a shower.”

  “Okay. The ghost can wait.”

  We spent the rest of that afternoon in bed. The world shrank to just the two of us twined together, warm and safe and sharing pleasures. When he got up to make dinner, I fell asleep, and for the first time in weeks I slept without bad dreams. He waited to wake me until close to nine o’clock that evening.

  After we ate dinner, we took his laptop, newer and better than mine, into the living room and sat on the leather couch to surf for news. Tor relaxed into the cushions, stretched, and smiled as he watched me searching on “Nils Halvarsson”. The afternoon had done him good, too. Until, anyway, in the website of a local newspaper I found a piece of news that terrified me. Bryndis Leifsdottir had contacted the police with the information that Nils had been acting strangely. A family friend—Tor—had told her that he seemed mentally ill. My voice shook when I read the news to Tor.

  “What if the cops follow that up?” I said. “It’ll lead them right to us.”

  “There’s no need for you to talk to the police,” Tor said. “I will. I’m the person Bryndis mentioned, not you.” He paused for a smile. “I can explain to them that she’s getting kind of muddled, too.”

  “She seemed perfectly sharp to me.”

  “Uh-uh. Gerda, Nils’ mother? Bryndis said she was Swedish, but she couldn’t have been. Gerda had to be Norwegian. That’s where the Nazi troops were stationed.” His voice turned into a growl. “That’s where they carried out their breeding program.” He shook his head and spoke normally. “Didn’t you realize that? When we talked to her, I mean.”

  “I didn’t know it.”

  Tor rolled his eyes. “Right. Americans and history.”

  “It seems weird that she’d get mixed up about that.”

  “Gerda probably moved to Sweden to get away from the prejudice against her. She was one of the Lebensborn children, remember? She had plenty of bigotry to run away from.”

  “Yeah, it must have been horrible, being blamed for something you had nothing to do with. But that’s not going to cut any ice with the police.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because they won’t know the difference. Like you said, Americans and history.”

  Tor looked honestly surprised. He could be so damn naïve at times about the real world!

  “Well, anyway,” he said. “I’ll call Bryndis first and find out what she told them. Sweetheart, leave the police to me! I’ll call them after I’ve talked to her.”

  “What if you have to lie? You swore that vow—“

  “That only applies to me. Not what I know about you.”

  When he took out his smartphone, I got up and ran into the bedroom. I couldn’t bear to listen, I just couldn’t. I sat down on the edge of our bed and held out my trembling hands, willed them to stop, took deep breaths. Tor returned after about ten minutes that seemed like ten hours.

  “Okay, you were right,” he said. “They really didn’t care what Bryndis thought about World War Two. Damn it, I’d hoped to throw them off by bringing that up.”

  “Told you.”

  He made a sour face at me. “They’re sending two men over. The detective on the case and his assistant.”

  I started to speak, but he held up his hand and stopped me. “Let me feed you. With enough élan, you can conquer the world.”

  “Not if they arrest me.”

  “Sweetheart, hush! They’ll never believe you bit him to death. You’re not a pit bull.”

  I managed to laugh.

  “Besides, if they try, we’ll go on the run. All I have to do is hug you and jump, and we can be miles away.” He meant it. Tor could move himself and me by magic, what you could call teleportation, I guess. “I’ll figure out what to do next once we’re at Billy’s.”

  “I just hope we don’t have to.”

  “First the élan. Worry later.”

  Once he’d fed me, I could face the police without shrieking or fainting like some old-fashioned heroine. The officers turned out to be Lieutenant Hu, the detective, a rumpled-looking, gray-haired guy in a navy blue business suit, and a uniformed officer, a white guy, who said nothing. I guess he was along as a bodyguard. When they arrived, Tor brought them upstairs and introduced me as his fiancée. Hu shot me a troubled and troubling glance. A lot of Asian guys resent Asian women marrying white men. Disliking me at first sight could double Hu’s suspicions.

  We all sat down, Tor and me on the couch, the police in the armchairs. Out of the corner of my eye I saw a faint
shimmer of light on Tor’s face. When I glanced his way, I saw that he’d cloaked himself in a minor illusion. His face looked slack, his eyes vacant, as he put on the mask of a nerdy guy.

  “We’re here because we’re investigating Nils Halvarsson’s death,” Hu said, just as if we didn’t know. “I understand that he’s your father’s illegitimate brother?”

  “That’s right,” Tor said. “Yes.”

  “Mrs. Leifsdotter told us that you were convinced he was shall we say mentally unbalanced.”

  “To start with, he thought he was a werewolf. His son told me that. My cousin Joel.”

  The uniformed cop choked back an unprofessional snort.

  “He told me the same thing,” Hu said. “What I’d like from you is a report of any actual incidents.”

  “Okay. My fiancée and I were having lunch with some of her friends from college. Halvarsson came by and stared into the window of the café. When I went out to confront him, he start screaming at me and making threats. He was mostly upset about my grandfather’s will.”

  “Witnesses besides Miss Cantescu?”

  “Sure, several, but we were arguing in Icelandic, so—“

  Hu looked martyred.

  “But,” Tor went on, “he was out on the street, waving his arms around and screaming. Everyone saw that. I think he thought he was sending curses my way. He also considered himself a sorcerer.”

  Hu nodded, considering, then turned to me. “Miss Cantescu, I understand you’re an art student at one of our local colleges.”

  “Yes.” I decided that I could be a big girl and take the initiative. “Has anyone told you about the slashed paintings at my portrait class?”

  Hu smiled, just slightly. I took that as a yes.

  “Tor’s uncle is the only person I can think of who’d do that. Whoever it was, they seemed to be after my painting more than the others, is why.”

  “I have the report on that incident. We did find evidence, and your surmise seems to be correct.” He glanced at the uniformed officer. “We need to contact the instructor at the art school. She deserves to know the findings.” Hu paused, smiling, then unleashed his surprise attack. “We’ve gotten the forensics report back on Halvarsson’s gun. We found it near the corpse. It’s the same gun that shot your brother.”

  Tor spoke before I could. “That’s what I figured,” he said, and his voice was a bit too sharp and strong to fit the nerdy illusion. “I told the officers on the scene that I’d seen Uncle Nils fire. He was shooting at me and missed. Wall Street guys don’t spend enough time on the firing range.”

  Hu’s smile turned brittle. “We have your statement, yes.” He stood up. “Well, thank you, Mr. Thorlaksson, Miss Cantescu.” He nodded our way. “I may need to talk with you again.”

  “Any time,” Tor said. “I can come down to the station if you need me to sign some kind of statement.”

  “That’s not necessary, not now anyway.” He emphasized the word ‘now.’

  With that they turned to leave. Tor showed them out, but I stayed as tight and tense as a stretched canvas until I heard the outside door shut behind them. Tor came up the stairs two at a time. The nerdy illusion had disappeared.

  “There,” Tor said. “That wasn’t as bad as it could have been.”

  “Except for the bit about the gun. He was hoping to shock me, wasn’t he? Into saying something wrong.”

  “Not wrong, just something he didn’t know.” He sat down next to me and put his arm around my shoulders. “It’s okay, honest. Go ahead and cry if you need to.”

  “Thanks, but I don’t. I just wish this were all over.”

  “It will be. People have short attention spans. Something else will take over the news.” He grinned. “Like football season.”

  I hoped so, but my stress level kept burning away on high. I needed to move around and distract myself. I got up and went into the kitchen to finish cleaning up after our dinner—my part of the household food chores, since Tor did all the cooking and most of the shopping. He followed me and leaned against the wall to watch.

  “Earlier,” he said, “I went downstairs and looked through the library. I found some stuff on the walking dead. Figured I would. They were considered a real problem in the old days. Mutilating livestock, strangling people, killing shepherds and eating their flesh, crap like that. The work of sorcerers, the legends say.”

  “That’s an awful lot of murders! How many evil sorcerers were there?”

  “Only a few like me.” Tor grinned in my direction. “But no, seriously, the sorcerers animated the dead, the legends run, to make trouble for their enemies. They didn’t work the harm themselves.”

  “So the dead were zombies, huh? I mean, bodies with hands and teeth to do those things.”

  “In the legends, yes. How true it is, I don’t know. Exaggerated, for sure.”

  “But if Nils was cremated, he doesn’t have a body. He must just be a ghost. Can you do anything about that?”

  “Oh yeah. I’ll work a ritual and summon him into the circle like I did before. This time I’ll destroy what’s left of him. Every last bit of it.”

  The cold horror I felt must have shown on my face. Tor walked over and took my hand.

  “He’s dead, Maya. He needs to go on to the next phase, get ready for his next life. He’s doing himself no good by hanging around. He’s only living, if you can call it that, as some kind of unnatural energy field. He’ll be better off once it’s gone. Honest. Just think of it as a second-stage cremation.”

  “Are you going to do it tonight?”

  “No, I need to be careful, use the runes to let me know what we’re facing, preparation like that. Tomorrow night, I was thinking.”

  “You don’t think he’ll appear tonight?”

  “I’ve set up wards downstairs. They’ll keep him out till I’m ready for him.”

  “Okay. You know what you’re doing.”

  He smiled, but my hands trembled. I concentrated on wiping down the counter. I could still remember the feel of Nils’ sweaty arm choking me, and the way he’d clubbed me with his revolver. I started the dishwasher, hung up the dishtowel, and went into the living room. Tor followed, and we sat down together on the couch. He put his arm around my shoulders and pulled me close.

  “Feel better?” he said.

  “A little. With everything else going on, I didn’t need a ghost. Or a giant turning up in the driveway.”

  “Which reminds me. That rime jötunn. Is he an etin or a thurs?”

  “Huh?”

  “The thursar are the really stupid, crass, violent giants. The etins have more class, even if they’re not real bright. What’s this kid like?”

  “Very polite. He likes sodas, and when I gave him a bottle of cola, he gave me the warning in return. His grandmother’s the one who told him about the dead vitki.”

  “So she knows magic. They’re definitely etins. We can trust him a little if he understands bargains. Just a little. You never really know what they’re up to. Some scheme of their own, usually, and I bet the gold’s part of it. Be careful if he comes back.”

  “You don’t need to worry about that.” What if the kid grabbed me one day and hauled me back with him to Jötunheim? I never wanted to be one of those maidens in the fairy tales, stuck in a magic castle waiting for some knight to come along and rescue me.

  “You haven’t told him your name, have you?” Tor said.

  “No.”

  “Good. Don’t. Never tell him mine, either, and don’t ask him for his. Knowing someone’s name gives you power over them in their world.”

  “I’ll remember that.”

  “I should go downstairs,” Tor said. “Cast the rune staves.” He slipped his arms around me and kissed the side of my neck. “Or we could go lie down.”

  “I thought you wanted to cast the runes.”

  “They’ll wait. They’re very understanding that way.”

  This time Tor was the one who fell asleep when we were fini
shed. I lay awake for a while, worrying about Nils. I decided that I’d be better off worrying about my senior project and slipped out of bed.

  We had several empty rooms in the house. Tor had offered to let me have any or all of them for my studio and storage. I wanted to avoid doing anything but drawing in the upper flat. Art generates a lot of mess, drips, spills, stacks of supplies, and for some processes, bad smells. Although I wasn’t going to paint in oils or do etchings, I might want to incorporate prints, maybe monotypes, maybe not, into the project. Printing inks are seriously messy and sometimes toxic.

  So I figured I’d turn the empty rooms downstairs into the studio, although I was worried about interrupting Tor’s rune work. That night, I would have gone downstairs to check out the available space there, but I remembered Tor talking about wards. Whenever he set them, they produced a sense of profound irritation for anyone in range. Sometimes they affected me like a high-pitched whine, sometimes like an extremely bright light, sometimes both with a sharp stink thrown in. I decided to wait till the morning rather than try to ignore them.

  Or was it really the wards that were keeping me upstairs? I stood in the dark hallway and listened like a hunted animal to every small noise: the air conditioning and the refrigerator humming and clicking inside the flat, from outside a distant car going up the hill, the tap of a branch against a downstairs window. Normal, safe noises—so why was I terrified? Something was waiting for me downstairs. I knew it suddenly, that something lay in wait, not a physical, live person, not a burglar or intruder, but a Presence.

  Who else but the man I’d killed?

  I hurried into the Burne-Jones bedroom and turned on the floor lamp. The alchemical barometer had changed its image. A deformed creature sort of like a lobster crawled half-way out of a shallow pool while two ravens flew above. The circle of lions around the image had turned green.

  I ran for the safety of our shared bedroom and slipped into bed next to Tor. In his sleep he turned over and reached for me. I snuggled close and listened to the reassuring sound of his heartbeat. Once I drowsed off, I slept till morning, held tight in his arms.